RIPENING
SEASONS

Issue #21, July 1997

Something less than conformity...
A study of three who turned their backs on it

I've been trying to put my finger on a certain
strangeness in this year. Or is it a strangeness in me, this year?
-- one can never be sure of the distinction between personal and
universal reality, especially in situations that seem to have an
aura about them, or some subtle quality not easily labeled.

We are at mid-year already -- the time has gone annoyingly fast
for me, in the typical fashion of these late years, but in the
oddest sort of way there's yet a quality of ease in my present
world, as though I have suddenly found life to be timeless, after
all. I move through my days with no sense of haste, despite the
time of year, and not much concern about the various things I
never seem to get to. I am immune to newspapers for once in my
life, seldom tempted to the Web any longer, not even 'driven
outdoors' when the weather is (though rarely) inviting.

My world, and hence the entire world (as I see it), has
slowed down -- a gift of immense proportions, but I cannot account
for it! There is a certain quietness in the air, and I can only
assume that moving into my eighth decade is having that effect on
me. There is another element, to be sure: Can you recall my having
said that I timed my recent journey (or tried) to attune with the
'October' of my 7-year cycle? Well, a 'month' on the seven-year
cycle runs for seven calendar months, so that I could very well
still be in that gentle 'October' phase . . . in fact, my travels
may have been too soon, for they felt more like the rocky
uncertainty of September.

Perhaps it is a blend of both causes. I think there is
something revitalizing in turning 70. Maybe that's not the right
word . . . more like the lifting of some sort of burden. Maybe the
burden of trying to 'stay young'? -- that would be a corker!
Better, perhaps, the burden of trying to prove something, to
justify something.

"Prove what?" you ask.

Would it make any sense if I said . . . my right to be who I
am?

"Ha!" you laugh. "And who has ever questioned it?"

A few, I think, but worst of all . . . maybe I,
myself. Why, else, was I in such a lather to have a book
published . . . to memorialize myself? Why, else, do I toil and
tire at setting up a Web site in order to present my 'works' to
the wide world (with no small nod to posterity)? Does a person
really satisfied with himself need such self-glorification?
Does a person who knows his worth have to keep proving
it?

Tough questions, those, and I've never had really good answers
for them. But I think, at long last, some are coming to me, and I
think it has to do with entering the closing stages of my life. An
oddment of this recent and inexplicable journey of mine has even
opened something of a pathway toward these realizations.

The difficulty has always been,
you see, that I chose the life of an outsider. A choice I've never
regretted, mind you, but a choice that has carried penalties and
perils, all the way. I managed to master those that revolved
around material insecurity; and I've done a fair joust with those
concerning the natural need for closeness and relationship --
finally coming into a gentle harbor that seemed, a few years ago,
hardly on the horizon. But one issue has dogged and hounded me
every step of the way. I swear, sometimes, that the Devil himself
rides this hound.

Whatever our course in life, we seem
to require the validation of others. It's that old "no man
is an island" thing . . . the ultimate necessity of community. We
tend to see community as a practical, or merely sensible thing,
but it is also a vital psychological need, without which there can
be no such thing as well-being. We have to know that we are
liked, appreciated and respected -- a need satisfied for most
through family life and career affiliation, neither of which have
I.

Still, my life has had its fair share of such blessings. But my
life, at the same time, has flouted convention in a deliberately
mocking and challenging way, for which I've earned also rebuke and
disdain, which has never rolled lightly off my back (though I
often pretend it has). I like to think I have the inner resources
to counter the momentary downside tilt that such rejection
invariably bestows, but give me an empty mailbox for a few too
many days, or a serious effort to dislodge me from my lodging, and
I find it isn't always so.

Little wonder, then, that the ultimate invalidation
threat -- going to the grave with nothing to leave behind --
should have proven such a worrisome thing.

But this is the life an outsider chooses, whether knowingly at
the outset or not. The challenge is to live it well: to
gracefully navigate the course, to learn from it, and if your wits
(and wit) be good enough, to hang in all the way, with no regrets.
I think I've done pretty well at it, but I never found the key to
letting that terminal anonymity roll easily off my back.

Well, I don't know if that will ever happen, but an interesting
avenue has been opening for me that seems to bear on it, a funny
trail that began with a book I ran across just before I left
London. It's been a sort of genealogical trail -- finding my
family -- but not of the usual sort.

¶ A Book at a Boot Sale

It all started at a boot sale, on my very last day in London.
That is not a typo -- I do mean boot, which is how a Britisher
refers to the trunk of an auto. A boot sale is like a flea market,
where second-hand goods were once sold from the open boot of a
car. Today, of course, they have tables and stalls . . . but the
name hangs on.

Anyway, it can be a wonderful treasure hunt for a stranger, and
I hadn't had the opportunity to seek one out until that final
Sunday in London. My remaining British currency was down to
£8, and with a threatening gray sky to nudge me onward, I
made the round of the several dozen stalls in an Earlsfield school
yard, about a mile from Marjory's where I was staying.

I didn't linger at the old Scot's table of books, but had my
eye on a slight little volume called The Friendly Road, for
which his £2.50 price seemed a mite high. I had to be sure to
leave enough for any chance windfall that might turn up. And,
indeed, one did: a magnificent wide-brim, real leather Aussie hat
that very nearly fit like it was made for me -- you know my
passion for hats. But incredibly, I only had to pay a single pound
for it!

Other odds and ends had taken my account down below £3,
when the first few drops of rain told me the time was up. I swung
around, and back to the old Scot's table just in time to grab that
little blue book before it went into his boot (actually, a rather
sizable trailer). I had no time for a more thorough browse of it,
nor he to make sure I'd handed him the full amount of change --
which I think I didn't. Into an inner pocket it went, until I
could shed my raingear, an hour later at Marjory's.

I had gotten a gem, as I soon
realized, for it was hard to put down. I'd never heard of David
Grayson, the man who penned The Friendly Road, but clearly
he had touched the heart of many before me, for this 1923 imprint
was a sixteenth edition. I assumed, of course, that he was
British, and visualized the rolling, neatly ordered fields of an
English countryside as I read the infectious tale of how he had
set out one day on an open-ended wander, leaving his own work to
await his return.

You can see, I'm sure, how I readily identified with it -- and
you can imagine how I was blown away when I came to the following
passage (slightly abbreviated) that explained his need (and
method) for connecting with people along the way...

". . . when I [left home] I had only enough
money in my pocket and sandwiches in my pack to see me through
the first three or four days. Any man may brutally pay his way
anywhere, but it is quite another thing to be accepted by your
human-kind, not as a paid lodger but as a friend. Always, it
seems to me, I have wanted to submit myself, and indeed submit
the stranger, to that test. Moreover, how can any man look for
true adventure in life if he always knows to a certainty where
his next meal is coming from? In a world so completely
dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered by
security, what fine adventure is left to a man of spirit save
the adventure of poverty?

"I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty
. . . What I mean here, if I may so express it, is an adventure
in achieved poverty. In the lives of such true men as Francis
of Assisi and Tolstoi, that which draws the world to them in
secret sympathy is not that they lived lives of poverty, but
rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very asking,
that they chose poverty as the better way of life."

He was clearly a man of my own persuasions, and I could hardly
wait to get back to my library resources at home, to discover more
about (and by) him. But I was in for something of a rude
surprise.

David Grayson, it seems, never existed! He was the fictional
creation of a man named Ray Stannard Baker -- an American, at
that. But as the story unfolded, I found one surprise after
another, and eventually came to see that Grayson was, in a sense
more than imaginary, a real person after all -- a person unable to
fulfill his passion for a free-spirited life, who yet lived an
entirely fulfilling life that brought him a good deal of renown .
. . only to vanish, finally, like the morning dream of an
imprisoned...America -- which you may not understand until I
finish the tale.

The real person, of course, was Ray Stannard Baker, whose
authorial name is to be found on a couple of musty old
multi-volume sets about Woodrow Wilson, one of which brought him
the 1939 Pulitzer prize for biography. But, then, W.W. being the
most forgettable of our heroic presidents . . . who cares about
R.S. Baker?

His claim on history has a stronger
base, however, going back to the century's opening decade, and a
feisty crew of journalists -- the first to rip into the growing
trend to business monopoly, with all of its ugly, unethical,
power-grabbing ways. They became known, pejoratively at first, as
the muckrakers, a term bestowed in 1906 by another feisty
personage, President Teddy Roosevelt. They were having so great an
impact, mainly in a magazine called McClure's, that TR,
himself, took the bait, finally, and came to the defense of
American enterprise, pointing out that it wasn't all bad.
Obviously, the American public had their justified doubts about
that . . . as they still do.

Ray Stannard Baker, in those days -- and by reputation for the
rest of his life -- was in the top echelon of that muckraker crew,
sharing the McClure's scene with Ida Tarbell and Lincoln
Steffens, and affiliated with such stalwart others as Upton
Sinclair and Jack London. But rather strangely, in the
half-century since his death -- and despite two full-treatment
biographies in the mid-1960s -- Baker seems to have 'faded from
the picture' like some hapless fantasy-film victim who vanishes
when his ancestors are slain by a time-traveler. Which makes for
some provocative speculation about the forces at work.

¶ From Muckraking to Ruck-making

But how does David Grayson -- our original interest -- fit into
this picture? In that same year of 1906 that TR went on his
teeth-baring rampage, the core crew at McClure's (including
Baker) split off to start a magazine venture of their own:
American Magazine. Hungry for copy to give it a good start,
the writer-investors ransacked their files of unpublished material
for anything that might fit. Baker had nothing that seemed usable,
but he had for many years packed his notebooks with stray thoughts
and idle reflections of a philosophical sort . . . pure musings on
how life might be, the sort of world we should rather be living
in, with scraps and quotes from others in the same vein. His
heart's dream had always been to write a great novel, for which
these bits and pieces were sketch material -- but, of course,
there were always more important things, and he never had any time
for it. But now, he wondered if a fictional framework might be
quickly drawn up for this vast and varied mine of material.

The thought, trifling at first, would not let go of him, for
all he worked at being rid of it. When he finally gave in, what he
came up with seemed flawed as a piece of fiction -- no plot, no
mystery or tension, no love interest . . . the meanderings of a
free spirit looking at life. Yet, it resisted any alteration. It
was what it was, and the question, now, was whether he dared
submit it to the editorial staff that knew him only as a
hard-driving, no frills investigative writer. After some further
soul search, he took the single safeguard of disguising the
authorship, and took it in. Absolutely no one but the chief editor
was to know from whom this work really originated.

To Baker's amazement, the six-part series (as it began) quickly
became the most popular thing he had ever written. The readership
demanded more, and so he obliged. And continued to oblige, though
he wouldn't let it interrupt the pace of his more significant
labors and primary mission (in his view): muckraking.

Not for ten long years, and several full books into the David
Grayson stream, was Baker willing to reveal his authorship. By
that time, he knew it was no fluke: Grayson was connecting with
the American soul at some profoundly deep level -- though Baker
honestly acknowledges, in his late-life autobiography, that he
never really understood the power those writings seemed to have.
Written more easily than his labored and serious work, it yet
generated a deeper, more intimate kind of appreciation. The
contrast never ceased to amaze and intrigue him.

Eventually, late in life, he tallied the Grayson output: 9
books, published over the course of 37 years, at an estimated
total of two million copies, both here and abroad. The earlier
ones remained in print and in demand all through that time, which
puts Baker right up there in the category of successful novelist.
But more, it establishes him as a kind of 'national nostalgiac'
(if I be permitted a coinage), for a time and way of life that by
mid-century was long vanished.

San Francisco's recently departed Herb Caen might similarly be
thought of as a 'Frisco nostalgiac' for the manner in which he
consistently renewed people's memories of a city long vanished but
somehow still alive, in the spirit at least. (Oh, he hated the
term Frisco with a passion! -- forgive me, Herb). The comparison
is not so far-fetched: Grayson's "Friendly Road" and Herb's old
San Francisco each portrayed not so much a place, as a way of
life; and each tugs at the heart because it was a way of life that
we once lived, on the upper slope of what has been a long, slow
slide into alienation. We look back, in each instance, to that
way of life, yet refuse to let go our tight hold on the
things of life today, and the promise of more of them. We
cannot seem to see the connection between an unrestrained progress
and the intensifying alienation that has been the course of our
century's history.

The most fascinating aspect of Baker and his alter-ego, from my
perspective, is that he/they personified both sides of this
quintessential ambivalence of America, and managed to keep the
tension in a productive balance for the whole of his life --
thanks largely to that fortuitous 1906 'birth' of David Grayson. I
suspect, in fact, that Baker was able to escape the alienation,
himself, on that account. His early ability to document internal
conflict, coupled with a lifelong pastime of actually going on
Grayson-like wanders (if only briefly and tepidly) whenever his
real-life burdens became too oppressive, worked in tandem to
provide an effective personal therapy.

¶ A Trail is a Trail...

Following the Baker trail down its
junction with the muckraker trail, I came upon the name, Josiah
Flynt, which at first meant little to me, until I saw what his
investigative specialty was. It rang a bell, and I stretched for
my own top shelf of bound Century Magazines -- 20 years of
them -- and, sure enough . . .

Josiah Flynt was not properly one of the muckraking crew,
though some have said he was the first of them -- he was a
precursor, really, writing on the world of tramps and hoboland (as
he called it), a good decade before the anti-establishment barrage
got underway. His work verged on exposé because it
eventually revealed the cozy ties between big city police
departments and the outcast culture that Flynt called the
Underworld -- a vagabond fringe element with a reputation in those
days for violence and petty criminal activity. But there were
other reasons than a principled concern that put Flynt on this
tack, as his autobiography unintendedly reveals.

That book, titled simply, My Life, was written shortly
before his untimely death at 38 and published posthumously in
1908. He stares soberly, almost grimly, from a frontispiece studio
portrait that may very well have been made near the end. There is
a kind of flat, defiant resistance in his expressionless eyes, the
set of his jaw, the fold of one arm over a coat too large for his
modest frame -- not an inviting visage.

The text opens with a dedication to all "who, like myself, have
come under the spell of that will-o'-the-wisp, Die Ferne,
the disappearing and fading Beyond, and who, like myself again,
are doomed sooner or later to see the folly of their quest..." and
one immediately realizes that he was not very happy with the
lifestyle he is about to portray and defend.

Die Ferne, for him, was the call of the open road -- the
strongest motif of his life, and one that I can easily identify
with. But Flynt felt himself plagued by it, going back to his very
earliest memories. He was raised in a midwest small town,
strait-laced and unsympathetic to his wandering ways, and he had a
"bad boy" reputation right from the start. He seems to have
absorbed this judgement of himself, but not to the point where it
could overcome his roving spirit. The result was a conflicted soul
-- living his life as he would, but never quite clear of
conscience about it.

Along with the wanderlust pure and simple, he was fascinated
with the social outcast and his way of life, working his way into
that fabric just for the pure joy and excitement of it. Had he
come along a century later, he'd surely have become a field
ethnologist, but the profession did not then exist -- nor any
recognition that a sub-culture has its good reasons for being . .
. and its devotees, theirs. Flynt was a man out of time and place
for his own well-being. Even had he never made it in today's
academia, he'd have felt far more at home in the wandering youth
culture of the 1960s than in that late 19th century world he had
to contend with.

He eventually found a way to live his Die Ferne life and
make it pay -- even gain him a modicum of respect, though it came,
ultimately, at a cost he may not have envisioned. Indeed, there
were undertones of classic tragedy in the tradeoff, for the social
respectibility he earned revealed itself a Faustian bargain, in
the end.

Flynt discovered, in the early 1890s, that there might be a
writer's market for his hobo lore -- if he handled it right. He
had to do it as an investigator might, portraying a purpose of
serious study, set against the morality backdrop of his Victorian
era. His articles were to inform and warn the reading public of
the legal and moral irregularities in this outcast world he was
documenting. Thus -- for economic opportunity, more than any
personal convictions -- he became 'the first muckraker,' exposing
the 'sordid life' of an under-culture he'd chosen as his own.

You can see the bind it put him in: Having steeled himself, for
twenty years, against the disapproval of his family and parent
culture, he now took up their cudgel, as it were, and performed
the coup d'grace against his remaining self-esteem. Where
Baker's compromise had resulted in a supportive alter-ego, Flynt's
created a persona in magisterial robes that turned around and sat
in judgement on himself . . . and eventually became his
executioner, for it was dissipation that brought on his death. He
could as well have sat by a voodoo fireside, sticking pins into
his own image.

¶ ...is a Trail...

Trails have a fascinating way of
maintaining their own momentum. I wanted a look at the American
Magazine that the erstwhile McClure's crew had not got
very far with, but I was told they were in auxiliary storage, not
readily available. So I went instead for a 1956 compilation,
"...the best of its first fifty years" of American. That
proved disappointing (after 50 years, origins become quaint, never
'best'), but not entirely fruitless. The UW library keeps its
earlier (Dewey Decimal System) books in their own separate order
-- a library within a library, as it were. As I returned the 1956
volume to its place, I saw something interesting alongside: a
large book with the intriguing title, The American Scrap
Book. It had nothing to do with American Magazine, as I
had briefly thought, but was a collection of magazine articles
from everywhere, for the year 1928. And as I flipped pages in a
casual browse, the book fell open by mere chance to page 80, near
the bottom of which the name of Josiah Flynt (by that time, 20
years gone and forgotten) flashed out as if in blinking
boldface.

He was mentioned only in passing. The article was by someone
named Jim Tully, and titled "An Ex-Hobo Looks at America" -- the
ex-hobo being Tully, not Flynt, and the tone of the article being
much more even-handed toward the hobo than anything Flynt might
have written. In fact, Tully took the discussion back to where
David Grayson might have felt comfortable with it. Here's a
taste:

"During my wandering boyhood I learned that most of
our criminal population was made up of those who had committed
crimes against property. This condition has not changed. Our
criminals are merely the stragglers in the great American
forward march, the leaders of which are those who believe 'that
they shall get who have the power, and they shall keep who
can.'

"...I looked more closely about me and realized keenly how
impossible it was for a young fellow of the middle or lower
class to obtain a cultural background worthy of the name.
Everywhere he was given the same advice in family, school or
college. Syndicated platitudes were as common as fog in London.
I could see youthful minds reeling under the staggering burden.
They were seldom strong enough to survive its monotonous
weight. It made of them types and not individuals. Banker,
merchant, tailor -- the viewpoint of America was the same."

Why had I never heard of Jim Tully? Once again, I set about to
find out who he was, and what had happened to him. But he proved
even more resistant than the other two, to any easy disclosure. A
few fiction books by him, but nothing (in my hurried first glance)
that seemed of any consequence. He was not in any of the standard
biographical sources. Finally, a reference librarian uncovered a
trace for me, in a 1982 issue of the quarterly mimeographed
newsletter of the Society for the Study of Midwestern
Literature.

Though I later found a book of his on my own shelves!(Beggars of Life, subtitled: a hobo autobiography), that
nine-page review in the 1982 newsletter, by its editor, David D.
Anderson, titled "A Portrait of Jim Tully: an Ohio Hobo in
Hollywood," is the only biographical material I have so far found
for him.

His story is, in some ways, more remarkable than either Baker's
or Flynt's, for its amazing shifts in lifestyle, fortune and
public recognition. From his early years in an orphanage, and a
life on the road between twelve and twenty-one, he finally became
a writer and a very well paid Hollywood press agent, living
comfortably off the 'excess greenery' that flows so plentifully in
that environment. Timing may well have been his forté, as
he hit Hollywood early in the 1920s when such things were possible
for a streetwise ex-"road kid" (to use his own term), and lasted
until it peaked, in the mid-'40s. Not an exceptionally long life,
but possibly a more integrated one than either of our earlier
protagonists, for he seems not to have had need of a constructed
alter-ego as a buffer for the life he led. While the thirty novels
he's credited with are said to be autobiographical -- telling the
same essential story -- there is no indication, as with Baker or
Flynt, that he was ever in denial of the inner self motivating
him. He considered his success, in large part, a joke . . . and
shared that assessment quite easily with everyone. He was ready on
the drop of an invitation, it seems, to strip the tinsel from that
tinsel capital and let the shards fall where they might.

But Tully, too, faded as fully from history's recall as his two
predecessors. More understandably, perhaps, for his attainments
were certainly less than Baker's, and he showed us no such tragic
dimension as Flynt -- but since Hollywood has a mythic hold on our
culture, it is still something of a puzzle. Why do we insistently
discard all reminders of a more carefree time and spirit, in this
ever too mechanized, far too regimented world? Why would we
rather not know of such things?

Tully's biographer also dwells on those very concerns. Anderson
wonders "...whether his works were considered simply no longer
relevant in a socially conscious age that sought to suffocate hobo
kids in various deals, societies and frontiers..." (in other
words, denying those youngsters the opportunity to seek the world
in their own way, thus blinding ourselves to the need for such
freedom). He observes Tully's awareness of "...a significant
dimension of American life that we overlook or ignore because it
denies what we prefer to believe about our country, our values,
ourselves." And again, "The reality that [Tully] defines
is not that of the American dream nor of its naive acceptance. His
reality is what he calls the American 'underworld,' not a place or
an ideal but a group of people who reject the American mainstream
and its values even as they are rejected by it." (The
emphasis is my own, here, for it links back to where I began this
report.)

¶ Pulling in the Net...

It seems that we are compelled, in this
society, to act out the fantasy of growth, whether it be
our true (personal) course, or not. We are drawn into a stream of
conformity that involves a success ethic, a consumer ethic, and
what is generally regarded as a responsibility ethic -- the idea
of which, however, is almost entirely argued in economic terms.
Thus, you cannot be 'responsible' in this society, in its
view, without having first subscribed to the success and consumer
ethics -- both of which force you on a path with pre-determined
notions of what is good for you.

The individual who bucks this ordained way becomes an outsider.
The society, at any given time, is full of youthful outsiders,
which is why the youth culture is invariably vibrant and alive (if
often a bane, for the settled and resigned). But the natural
course of aging leaves the outsider ever more isolated, allowing
basically two possibilities on his/her horizon: a relatively
solitary and usually impecunious later life, or eventual surrender
to the primary cultural motif . . . and the dulling of one's inner
spirit, in order to accommodate.

A few outsiders -- but only a few -- become avante garde
cultural icons, for their iconoclasm, but it may be less a
breakthrough than another pitfall -- as one may gather from the
symptoms of despair that all too often plague their lives. From
any standpoint but fame, they may have lost more than was ever
gained by it. In any event, most of the youthful outsiders sooner
or later conform.

I think it is important to realize all this, especially the
lonely path of the rebel if it persists, and the ultimate
anonymity of it as a predictable future, if one would avoid
despair. Our three case histories illustrate various kinds of
compromise made with society's relentless pressure -- not
leastwise of the economic sort -- toward conformity, and they've
been a useful study, right at the time in life when I most need
it. Baker's compromise was probably the most successful, giving
him almost everything he wanted of life -- though Baker seems
never to have been as deeply rebellious as the other two. Flynt's
was the most damaging, for it was a compromise of the very spirit
that motivated his rebellion. Tully, like Flynt, compromised in a
cynical, opportunistic way, but was able to carry it off,
apparently, without rejecting his spirit in the
process.

For all these differences, however, their stories come to a
remarkably similar conclusion: Even having obtained the
recognition for which they compromised, they are forgotten by the
world as they pass from the memory of their contemporaries. As
much as I deplore that circumstance, I also find it comforting to
know, in the face of the doubts that occasionally visit me, for
having resisted compromise, myself, in these outsider years of my
life.